Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The following post is by guest blogger Carl H.
Winnefeld, Jr. who is mining our Aero Service Collection looking for
photographs of company personnel and aircraft. A former Aero Service
employee, Winnefeld and colleagues are compiling this information for a
website and potential future publication. Winnefeld stumbled upon the above
photograph inspiring him to write the blog post below. The blog post was
originally written for the World War One blog, Home Before the Leaves Fall. The Home Before the Leaves Fall website
is an initiative of multiple cultural institutions in the Delaware Valley to
digitize and make available their holdings related to World War One. The
Library Company’s World War One collection can be found on ImPAC, the Library
Company’s digital collections catalog, with the collection broken down into two
sub-categories: World War One Posters
and Photographs
and Ephemera. In addition, a selection of World War One
posters appear on Flickr.

The Aero
Service Collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia contains material
(primarily photographic images) acquired by the Aero Service Corporation and
its president, Virgil Kauffman over a 40 year time frame. Aero Service was
founded in Philadelphia in 1919 as Pennsylvania Aero Service and remained based
in Philadelphia until 1973 when it relocated to Houston,
Texas. The company operated on a worldwide basis. Its primary
business was aerial photography, photogrammetry (the use of photography in
surveying and mapping to measure distances between objects), and remote sensing
using an airborne magnetometer. In 1934 Aero Service
worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority to map areas where the TVA
was responsible for developing watershed resources. In 1947 Aero Service
flew one of the first large airborne magnetometer surveys using Shoran
navigation control over the Bahamas.

The Aero Service Corporation’s longtime president Virgil
Kauffman (portrait above) was born in Yardley Pennsylvania in 1898. With the
onset of World War I, Kauffman was assigned to the Corps of Engineers
Photography School. The Army Air Corps utilized aerial photography for
intelligence during the war and Kauffman was assigned to participate in
the aerial reconnaissance missions, making this his introduction to aerial
photography. After the war, he joined Aero Service in 1924 and directed the
company from 1927 to 1961. His contributions to the scientific and technical
world were wide ranging and significant. In 1966 he funded the Virgil Kauffman
Gold Medal to be awarded by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists for
outstanding contribution in geophysical exploration. Kauffman was associated
with the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University from 1961 to 1985.
Virgil Kauffman passed away in 1985.

The first image above shows the village of
Blondefontaine, France in the winter of 1918 immediately after the war.
Blondefontaine is located 285 kilometers. southeast of Paris. The village
today looks very much as it did in 1918. The image below is a
description of the scene written by Virgil Kauffman. The photograph
provides a view of just how grim it must have been during the war years in
France.

Verso of Street of
Blondefontaine- Dec. 26-1918. Library Company of Philadelphia

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The Morris Collection keeps on growing! David Marriott Morris, Eleanor Rhoads Morris
Cox and William Perot Morris recently added to the Library Company’s holdings
of over 1600 of their grandfather’s photographs with a gift of travel journals
by Marriott C. Morris and his daughter Jane as well as copies of letters
written by Morris while attending Haverford College.

The letters, written by Morris between 1881 and 1885 to his
mother Martha Canby Morris, reveal a bit of the young photographer’s
personality. Even from this relatively
small sampling, the frequency with which the letters were sent and the
affection they contained show a son devoted to his mother. Morris’ familial dedication also extended to
his sister Bess, for whom he often expressed concern and inquired after. The letters also reveal a scholar who was
serious about his studies – but not too serious. Morris described his classes and lectures in
a generally positive way, except for the subject of Trigonometry, which seems
to have been a thorn in his side. He
expressed his distaste for the subject with a dash of dry humor in a letter
written on November 9, 1883. He wrote to
his mother, “You little thought when you were comfortably seated at dinner yesterday
that I was undergoing the horrors of that Trigonometry examination. Yet it was even so.” When he wasn't suffering through
Trigonometry, Morris engaged in a variety of social activities with a large
group of friends, including George Vaux, another member of a prominent
Philadelphia Quaker family. Morris’
letters described football games, dinner parties, sledding, and an intricate
telegraph project conducted with Vaux.

Even in these letters from his early Haverford days, Morris’
passion for photography is clear. Morris
frequently mentioned both finished prints and his photographic process when
writing to his mother. In a letter from
October 25, 1883 Morris asked his mother to bring him two photographs he had
mounted earlier that fall to decorate his room.
He remembered that one of the photographs depicted the library, but
could not remember the subject of the other photograph, which was taken at the
same time.

By matching the date of the letter with photographs in the
Morris Collection, it is possible that the unknown second photograph could have
been of the Morris family’s old house, Soldier’s Monument or the Quaker meeting
house, all located in Germantown.

A few months later, Morris wrote to his mother about some
photographs he had taken with his friend George Vaux. He called these photographs of the “fellows”
and the class of ’87 “the best groups I have ever tried.” Morris was proud of these photographs but
also profited from them. He told his
mother that he planned to charge 20 cents per print and already had some
orders.

However, in this same letter Morris expressed frustration
with his more recent photographs. He wrote
that he was trying out some new plates and had not yet perfected their
use. Similarly, in a letter from March
14, 1884 Morris wrote a long entry about his recent experimentation with a new
wide angle lens. Regardless of Martha
Canby Morris’ comprehension or interest in the minute details of her son’s
photographic practice, these surprisingly technical missives reveal Morris in
the act of finding his way as a photographer and the genesis of his project to
document his experiences and environment.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Over the weekend of October 25th and 26th,
the Library Company was the host site for a workshop on Ethiopian Bookbinding
that was sponsored by the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Guild of Book
Workers. The Library Company conservators
are all members or officers of the chapter and have organized a number of guild
events over the years. Ten students
attended the workshop, which was taught by Bill Hanscom, a conservation
technician for special collections at Harvard Library. Bill has been researching Ethiopian bookbinding
for a while and is currently writing an essay to be published in the next
volume of Suave Mechanicals: Essays on the
History of Bookbinding.

At the beginning of the workshop, Bill showed images of Ethiopian
bindings and explained the typical features.
Amazingly, many of the features have not changed for more than 1400
years. He showed some videos of the
books being made in a marketplace in Ethiopia. In one video, a man was
squatting and working on the ground, applying paste to the covering leather
with his hand. Next, our group examined two
Ethiopian bindings owned by the Library Company, one rather large and grand and
the other very modest, almost primitive.
In the past, I always thought they were interesting bindings. But now that
I knew more about how they were made and could identify the various features, I
looked at them with new eyes! It was
very helpful for everyone to be able to examine authentic examples.

Then we started working on our own historically accurate models.
We shaped and pierced wooden boards. We
made sewing “thread” buy cutting a thin spiral out of a circle of parchment, and
then moistening and twisting it into one long strand. Most of us made three books, one covered in
leather, one with a cloth wrapper called a “lebas,” and one with a parchment
spine.

Today, Ethiopian bindings are still made with only a few
tools. Unlike the man in the video, we worked sitting at tables, but tried to follow his technique otherwise. For me, it is always inspirational to make a historical
model. I try to imagine how various binding features evolved over time and to
consider their purpose. Was it
structure, decoration, or tradition? In
many cases it could be all three. But
the most important thing is that it helps me know what I am looking at and what
is important when I approach a binding in my work as a conservator.

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The Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Open to the public free of charge, the Library Company houses an extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art. Founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, the Library Company is America's oldest cultural institution and served as the Library of Congress from the Revolutionary War to 1800. The Library Company was the largest public library in America until the Civil War.

The mission of the Library Company is to preserve, interpret, make available, and augment the valuable materials in our care. We serve a diverse constituency throughout Philadelphia and internationally, offering comprehensive reader services, an internationally renowned fellowship program, online catalogs, and regular exhibitions and public programs.